864-223-1911 again

Update (May 14, 2007)- Funny, I just got called by these clowns this morning. Hadn't heard from them in months. When I was direct about my desire to see him in prison, he said he would put me on the "do not call list." How very helpful. Also found lots of comments on this number at whocalled.us.

I have posted on this scam-in-progress three times: first post; second post; and third post.

The summary is this - these folks have spoofed their Caller ID to appear as "G & S Moore. 864-223-1911." Further, a reverse look-up comes back as "Gary and Scarlett Moore, 115 Carriage Ct., Greenwood, SC 29646." The number is disconnected.

Most of us answer the call because it seems to originate from a residence and because we're nice - a wrong number redirected saves us from helping an old person across the street.

The caller is typically male with an eastern Indian accent (see the many comments on the previous posts) and is offering cellular telephone service, many times premised upon having won a free phone.

It is an attempt to steal your identity. Pure and simple.

Complaints have been filed with Verizon (usually the company mentioned) and the FCC. The resolution of the complaints has been, to my knowledge, a shrug.

The crux of the issue from our perspective - us poor folks just trying to keep a-holes off of our telephones and out of our lives - is how the Caller ID is spoofed. It is not an issue of enhancing the laws (I used to practice criminal law and never knew a criminal that cared about gun laws in his weapon selection). Although, upon reflection, enhanced laws would perhaps bring the investigatory budgets of federal law enforcement into the matter.

I posed the question in one of my posts of how to spoof a Caller ID, and the following explanation was just proffered. I haven't vetted it nor will I. Seems to give more than enough links for you all to do that.

Thank you peak-a-boo!

peak-a-boo has left a new comment on your post "864-223-1911 Update":

Hey, I didn't have time to read through all the comments to see if anyone else had posted about the Caller ID, but in today's world it is VERY VERY TRIVIAL to spoof one's Caller ID. Basically, it works because the Caller ID system was never meant as a form of authentication, so the entire phone system (in America anyway) just accepts its CID from the phone placing the call. This wasn't much of a problem until somewhat recently. Mostly the people who would spoof their CID were businesses with 100's of phone lines, but every time they would dial out they wanted the same Phone Number to show up on people's CID's. These companies that want to spoof their CID would normally be a pretty large business, so they would already be using large commercial PBX's (Private Branch eXchanges). Using these VERY VERY EXPENSIVE PBX's they can have it send their CID number as whatever they want.

Now, basically what has made it a much larger problem for a lot of people is the influx of VoIP, and more specifically Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org). Asterisk is a FREE, Open Source, SOFTWARE PBX. So as opposed to all of the old phone hardware people used to have to have that cost 10's of thousands of dollars, and a lot of money for support, anyone can very easily run Asterisk on their computer, route their telephone wires through it, and have as much, if not more control over their phone system than any of these large corporations.

Asterisk runs on Linux/Unix based platforms. It is a very powerful system that gives you full control over every aspect of your phone system. There are many other things Asterisk is very good for besides Spoofing CID, it can route your calls to different places in a building, send calls to different voice mail boxes, display information you want it to using Text-to-Speech with feeds from the Internet, Etc. It is a very useful tool for a lot of people and a lot of businesses, but unfortunately a lot of people take advantage of it to illegally and annoyingly call many many people.

Congress has been working on passing some laws to regulate CID spoofing, and I think the ones that went through, make it illegal to spoof your CID if you have the intent to defraud someone. But of course, that's not going to stop these people. Another way that your average person can use to spoof CID without setting up Asterisk or another PBX, would be to use a service like SpoofCard (http://www.spoofcard.com). Spoof Card is a service very similar to regular Calling Card providers, except when you place the call they allow you to set the CID to whatever you want. All that company is doing with that service to get it to spoof the CID's is just that when people call in to their Calling Card's 1800 Number, they are calling into the companies Asterisk system at their offices. Then they have you enter the # to call, & the # to spoof, then route your call back out to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) with the Spoofed CID, and they're done.

I hope that cleared up Caller ID spoofing.... Search around the web for some of those terms I said if you want to learn more. If I gave any inaccurate information, I apologize. Despite all this, Asterisk is a great application, and is fun to play around with. Go ahead and install it at your house to play around with.... There's lots of fun stuff to do with it.